Posted
by
kdawson
on Tuesday June 05, 2007 @12:44AM
from the sure-the-gimp-has-a-plugin dept.

jsepeta writes "I've been using Adobe products for years, and own several older versions of the products from their Creative Suite: Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, Acrobat Pro, and Dreamweaver. I'd like to teach some graphic design and web production skills to my coworkers in the marketing department, and realize that most of them can't afford $2500 to buy Adobe's premium suite and, frankly, shouldn't need to because there should be competitive products on the market. But I can't seem to locate software for graphic design and printing that outputs CMYK files that printing companies will accept. And I'm not familiar with any products that are better than FrontPage yet still easy to use for Web design. Any suggestions? Our company is notoriously frugal and would certainly entertain the idea of using open source products if we could implement them in a way that doesn't infringe upon our Microsoft-centric hegemony / daily work tasks in XP."

+1 for Paint.NET
I use Photoshop at home on my main computer but I use Paint.net on all my other computers including my work computer (my company doesn't want to buy photoshop).

I tried GIMP but didn't really like it, Paint.NET is incredibly easy to use and has most of the features that most people need most often. Paint.NET also passed the the test of being easy enough that my mother could use it. Where Photoshop and GIMP both failed. While it doesn't even come close to the features offered by Photoshop

It's always funny to see someone who never designed professionally in their life suggest GIMP.

GIMP lacks so basic features such as a usable grid, 16-bit/HDR image support, and requires special plugins with numerical inputs to draw a simple rounded rectangle, let alone something more complex.

The closest I've seen to Photoshop is Pavel's Pixel [kanzelsberger.com] editor. It works on any OS you can imagine, from DOS to OS/2, Windows, MacOSX, Linux etc. It's very cheap and it's basically a clone software of Photoshop in many regards.

Other than this, there's Corel's Paintshop and Painter, but Painter is more oriented towards natural media art, not synthetic design or editing photos. Yes, neither of them are free, either. That's because people who have a clue designed them, and people who have a clue in the design industry don't work for free.

You could skimp on Dreamweaver, InDesign, Illustrator, but you won't last long without Photoshop, even if when someone sends you PSD next time and you realize that when GIMP advertised "importing PSD" they actually meant more like importing Photoshop 4 level PSD and losing everything else in the design, thus wrecking it in the process.

Comparing Photoshop-GIMP to MS_Office-OpenOffice is extremely unfair. GIMP is really a toy, it has few interesting plugins and crude tools, while OpenOffice is actually quite usable, even if it lacks some features, it definitely has the basics right, and working.

I have both OpenOffice and GIMP installed here, next to MS Office and Photoshop. I use GIMP only to run the texture resynthesis plugin when I need a tileable texture.

I still wouldn't recommend GIMP for replacing PhotoShop directly in an existing Apple + Adobe + PostScript/EPS/PDF workflow, because of the lack of CMYK support, and the difficulties of working in the RGB colourspace, which doesn't have a clear enough overlap with the CMYK colourspace, and the lack of gamut warnings (visible indication that you've used colours that can't be printed). This stuff needs to happen in the editing interface - to the person who said, isn't it like the sound system compensating for a listening room, no, it's more like the recording engineer noticing when the needles are stuck all the way at 10 (max level) and detail is getting lost. You can't add detail back later.

Inkscape and sk1 are both being used as vector-based software in pre-press (sk1 was designed for that) but overall the Free Software graphic design workflow is not yet very mature. Part of that is that the commercial works has been responsive overall to designer's needs, and part of it is that designers are only very rarely programmers, and programmers only rarely get involved in graphic design enough to understand why OpenOffice + GIMP isn't a total solution.

People have been working on improving the situation - e.g. the organisers and participants at the Libre Graphics Meeting [libregraphicsmeeting.org]. Scribus is indeed advancing rapidly, with a lot of momentum, although its text handling in some ways still lags behind very early versions of Quark, and as it stands today it's not going to challenge people who have come to rely on the newer features of InDesign. But really, it's early days yet. We're in some ways not quite where the proprietary world was in the late 1980s, and in other ways we're ahead of the proprietary world, but we have to catch up in some of the places where we're behind.

It's no good asking to use software they have no real hope themselves of modifying or enhancing, and saying, use this, and if it doesn't work for you, just add features, and by the way it doesn't do everything that right now you believe you need, because it's as much use as handing a person with no legs who needs to get somewhere a broken bicycle. This is not to say I don't believe in Free Software. I just recognise that we don't yet have a Free solution to everyone's needs yet.

You've obviously only been using Photoshop for the past couple revisions.

I'm using Photoshop since version 3. When version 3 existed, GIMP didn't exist at all.Now you won't actually want me to compare the 2007 version of GIMP with Photoshop in the early 90-s right. That wouldn't make much sense.

Whether I use GIMP or Photoshop, I live in 2007, and therefore I judge based on the latest version of both products.

It's only really in the CS versions that the lines between Illustrator and PS have been blurred heav

No doubt that I would agree with the parent 100%. GIMP may be acceptable for casual doodler or cropping photos, but it ultimately a complete waste of time for any professional accustomed to a plethora of serious tools and a myriad of features used daily to make a living. We don't even have to discuss its' intolerable user interface because GIMP's graphic capabilities are not even in the same ballpark as Photoshop.

However, one may be able replace some of the other software depending on how you used it. The original poster framed the scenario as tools for the marketing department to use, which clearly lowers the bar in terms of expectations as to what level of competency will be applied. Marketers are not designers, so it would appear as though if Software X does a reasonable job approximating most tasks of Adobe Y, then one can adopt it.

Photoshop - You're unlikely to replace that one. Although, someone else mentioned Pixel [kanzelsberger.com] which could possibly cut the mustard depending on your needs. Otherwise, there really is nothing to compare to Photoshop.

Illustrator - Definitely have a strong look at Inkscape [inkscape.org]. I've toyed with it for 2 or 3 years to keep tabs on its' development, after being fairly impressed during my first run through. These days it has continued to advance and I'd suggest it's ready for the professional world. You can create substantially complex pieces with Inkscape which will probably far out-pace the ability of your Marketing department to bother learning in the first place. While it might be missing a pet feature or two, the bottomline is that Inkscape is ready to be taken seriously as a replacement for Illustrator (and, previously, FreeHand).

InDesign - Professionals already use Scribus [scribus.net] to handle multipage full color layouts sent directly to commercial print houses, so it's gotta be worth your time to look at. CMYK separation, PDF generation,and much of the toolsets you'd expect to see in Quark or InDesign; certainly more than enough power for your Marketing department.

Acrobat Pro - If you're heavily using features like annotation, collaboration, form creation, et cetera, then you probably won't be replacing Acrobat Professional. Nothing can touch it. However, if all you need is to be able to allow your Marketing droids to generate PDFs from documents they create in other software, then you can slap PDFCreator [pdfforge.org] on their little Windows boxen. Remember that OpenOffice already has the ability to turn any of their normal documents and spreadsheets into a PDF at a click of a button. Surely, you've dumped MS Office by now.

Dreamweaver - This is a tough one because you should probably rethink your environment to realize you most likely don't really want Dreamweaver to be used. Unless you're just using Slashdot to conveniently survey the geek mindshare, the odds are that WYSIWYG is an old paradigm no longer needed by most scenarios. What you probably want is some kind of content management engine which your key tech person(s) can administer such that your Marketing department can monkey with the website(s). One engine could be adapted to various websites, if you proposed such a need. If I were to suppose someone was trolling Slashdot, then I would mention Quanta Plus [kdewebdev.org] before realizing Marketing droids would be helplessly confined to Windows and thus I'd point to Nvu [nvu.com] as your capable hero.

But, really, if an evaluation of your technical needs leads you back to WYSIWYG, then you've made a logical error somewhere. The days for that hobbled solution are definitely over.

There you have it! Free and open source software is up to the challenge is most regards. Where there are shortcomings, there are adept proprietary solutions for far, far less than the onerous cost of Adobe

Yep, lack of CMYK is a significant limitation in the GIMP, and it has some issues. I wouldn't characterize it as a "toy" by any stretch, however, and I've found it quite capable for much of the work I do. The biggest day-to-day complaint I run into is its' inferior performance and previews as compared to Photoshop.

I don't consider lack of 16 bit RGB support a crippling problem for all workflows. Certainly, along with limited RAW support and lack of any sort of ICC colour management it's a problem for high-end photography work, but it's not really a killer for many uses. In fact, the newspaper I work with uses 8-bit colour all the way through its workflow at the moment - and while we'd probably benefit from moving to 16-bit colour for image archival and manipulation, it really doesn't make that much difference for many uses.

I have a much bigger problem with the lack of ICC colour support and CMYK support. You need at least one or the other for a print-targeted workflow, with both strongly preferable. If you only have ICC colour support, you'll need DTP apps that can do the right thing with tagged images, and you won't want to be working on really difficult images that need fine-tuning after colour space conversion. And if you only have CMYK support you'd better have a decent external tool with ICC colour support to the RGB->CMYK conversion, or the result will be muck.

It's exciting to see all the work going in to GEGL (the core for the new GIMP revision with much-improved support of ICC colour, multiple colour spaces, higher bit depths, non-destructive workflow, etc) and I can't wait until some of that starts appearing in a reasonably usable form. Their approach to non-destructive editing & history is the first thing I've seen in GIMP that makes me sit up and take notice when working on Photoshop.

What's even funnier is the poster who declares that others have never designed professionally, while never posting a link to their own portfolio. For all we know, your sum total of graphics design experience involves crayons and construction paper.

- sincerely, a professional designer who uses all FOSS tools, and kicks your butt at it.

1. Bitching about me not posting portfolio examples for some reason, while you yourself not posting any portfolio too: -2 points.2. Posting as Anonymous Coward while bitching about above point: -10 points.3. Claiming your kick my ass in design without knowing what I do, and without me knowing what you do: -25 points.4. Posting links, the majority of which are about people who moved to Linux, and not about people who moved to GIMP: -50 points.5. Comparing dust removes and wire removal on CinePaint, with original design on a full-blown raster editor: -1000 points.6. Citing the CinePaint project manager as a reliable source about how many people use CinePaint versus other tools: -2000 points. Did you know Adobe also claims "Photoshop is the most used application in the motion picture industry"? But wait, one of your links says CinePaint has got Scooby Doo covered, that's impressive by itself.

He probably means support for custom color management and custom CMYK profiles. In the print industry, it's common to do what's called a SNAP test, where the actual ink output from the press is measured and graded. The numbers from the snap test are then used to determine the CMYK profile in Photoshop, which has several variables:

DOT GAIN: Dot gain is the amount a dot of ink expands on paper (because paper is porous) which makes it appear larger. There is far more dot gain on, say, newsprint than on magazine paper, because of the porousness of the paper. There is a pretty good graphical representation of this here. [umax.co.uk] The first gradient represents the information sent to a printer or press. The second gradient is the printed output from that printer or press. Since the dots expand on paper and appear bigger, or more densely packed, the output appears darker than intended. By inputting the actual dot gain from a particular press (which can be affected by dozens of variables), Photoshop is able to compensate, adjusting the values sent to the printer so that what we see onscreen more accurately matches what we see in print.

INK PROFILES: Cyan ink isn't always really Cyan ink...especially when it's printed on off-white paper. (In other words, nearly all paper.) There are several different ink manufacturers and their inks differ visually, and there are thousands of different papers each with their own color. The SNAP test will actually measure the color of the paper itself, and the values of 100%C, 50%C, 40%C-30%M-30%Y (a neutral gray) and Photoshop is able to use these numbers, again, to adjust the information sent to press to best compensate for the weaknesses of the ink and paper.

Now, I haven't used GIMP besides casually opening it and getting confused by the interface, but I just looked in Preferences and apparently you can't even use CMYK colorspace AT ALL, let alone the custom inks and paper settings that are completely NECESSARY for any serious designer / publisher. Just supporting CMYK colorspace is NOT good enough. Without support for custom profiles there is not a snowball's chance in hell that print professionals would use this program anytime soon.

Given Adobe CS's ability to coordinate these ink profiles throughout all their programs, IMO there is no other viable option for someone who will be sending their files to press. Not if they want accurate color output.

Whilst I completely agree with your points here it's worth noting that depending on exactly what the poster's colleagues are going to be working on, decent support for any of this stuff may not be needed. How often to projects really require Pantone accuracy in their colour reproduction?

A good print service should be able to take input in any non-stupid format and use that as the starting point for a Photoshop workflow. Indeed, most print services I've worked with wouldn't expect customers - even customer

I worked in the newspaper industry until really recently. We either - built the ads FOR the customers - accepted their crappy MS-Publisher built ads and did the best we could with them - or worked with high-end clients who had their own graphic design dept and were capable of using our sourced CMYK profiles.

In the first case, we were handling the color profiles ourselves, and just had to reject the scanned-off-a-fax art the client wanted to use. In the se

Gimp is an alternative for photoshop in much the same way Openoffice is an alternative to MSoffice or linux is an alternative to OS X.

Actually, I don't think that that's a fair comparison at all.

OOo is not a horrible replacement for MS Office. I could, with a straight face, recommend that the average user use OOo rather than fork out $400 for Office 2007 Standard. Especially if that person is not an Excel junkie. I use OOo at home and MS Office at work, and not only am I am perfectly happy with both, I c

It makes me puke whenever people say Linux is actually an equal to Mac OS X.

But I actually said:

Sometimes the OSS tool is better for the job.

You see, Linux is not an equal to OS X and OS X is not an equal to Linux. They're completely different beasts. There are some uses where OS X will absolutely not cut the mustard. There are some uses where Linux won't be adequate. Everyone but clueless partisans can see that.

This one really is a no-brainer -- you get what you pay for. Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, etc. etc. are best-of-breed pieces of software. They're actually quite good, and probably worth the exorbitant license fees you will pay in productivity improvement, quality of output, employee frustration (lessened), support, usability, compatibility, you name it. They're standard for a reason, and Adobe is a fairly good company in that they haven't taken that for granted.

This one really is a no-brainer -- you get what you pay for. Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, etc. etc. are best-of-breed pieces of software. They're actually quite good, and probably worth the exorbitant license fees you will pay in productivity improvement, quality of output, employee frustration (lessened), support, usability, compatibility, you name it. They're standard for a reason, and Adobe is a fairly good company in that they haven't taken that for granted.

It's horrible slow. At least on Mac. In Photoshop you can actually edit, move around curves and see the result live, in Gimp you can literally see how the screen builds up. And I talk about a G5 2.5 PowerMac with more than enough RAM...

I invested in Photoshop at the end, and there is no way back at the moment.

"I've been using Adobe products for years, and own several older versions of the products from their Creative Suite."

You've said it yourself, use older versions. Your marketing colleagues don't need the most recent versions. On ebay, you could probably pick up a few training videos and training manuals real cheap too, since the training stuff for old software loses its value as quickly -- if not quicker -- than the software it supports.

If the cost is still prohibitive, you could probably buy an old PC (or an old Mac), and have your coworkers share the station whenever they need to use the software. That's the thing with this kind of software, since it's not their primary job to do graphic design -- they may not all need to use the same graphic design software at the same time.

I realize you may just be looking for a place to complain, and perhaps my unsympathetic suggestions were not what you were looking for, but really -- look around some other businesses -- many businesses are still using Windows 98 -- and they're doing fine.

There are a *lot* of gimp users that I know of that would switch 100% to PhotoShop if it was released on Linux, gimp is only used to avoid switching back to windows. $2500 is not much compared to a salary. I also aggree with some of the above comments. For a large majorty of people Gimp would be fine as they don't use any of the photoshop fetures anyway.

There are a *lot* of gimp users that I know of that would switch 100% to PhotoShop if it was released on Linux, gimp is only used to avoid switching back to windows.

You know what, I've heard this argument both ways, "If Linux had [favorite application] lots of people would switch to Linux" "If [favorite application] ran on Linux, lots of people would use it instead of using " and so on.

What have I seen over the years? I've seen countless [favorite applications] running under Crossover/Wine just fine (includ

People need to watch what numbers they're throwing around. $2,500 is the price of Photoshop AND Illustrator AND InDesign AND Dreamweaver AND Flash AND Fireworks AND Acrobat Professional AND Bridge AND Contribute AND a bunch of other tools. In other words, the entire suite.

Photoshop by itself can be had for much cheaper, especially the student version.

For everything CS2 and previous:Edit -> Preferences -> Set "History States" up to 1000.

For CS3:Edit -> Preferences -> Performace -> Set "History States" up to 1000.

That enough undos for you?

Why the default setting is only 20, I don't know; I guess for performance reasons.

As for your other objections, I can't relate. I'm not a programmer, I'm a designer.As with every professional application there is a learning curve. Once you have that out of the way, Photoshop is excellent and the industry standard for a very good reason.

Not entirely. Photoshop not only adds pixel state changes to the history palette, but also simple things like "select" and "deselect", guide positions, as well as text edits (which are vector based changes). [..] They're so simple and quick there is no reason not to redo these steps in realtime instead of caching pixels. This information is relevant as any of these steps take away from the default 20 history states. [..] When Photoshop saves pixel changes, I presume it only caches those portions of the imag

True. However, it is possible to work the other way: store the original image once, from before the first undo event, along with a simple list of the operations that took place since that point. To undo just reload the original image and reapply all the chances except the most recent.

I (and anyone) would perform probably several thousand operations at least on a design or art piece by the time it's done.

Replaying from starts quickly becomes impractical. Also, the brush, filters and all this, it takes CPU to

Undo is limited to ridiculously low number of operations. Layer styles produce ridiculous results on common images and randomly refuse to work with different layer types. Simple things take forever to complete. Gimp still has a learning curve but also features logical design that appeals to programmers.

Your rant is the reason why usually programmers are not sent in Photoshop to draw icons and artwork. Designers do that.

Undo levels are configurable, the layer styles algorithms are standard and mainstream (wh

No, we should just recognize that helicopters are not appropriate for most transportation (too expensive and too difficult to fly) and help the submitter of the article explore free or low cost alternatives such as walking, driving or "hosted" air travel.

It's more complicated than that - the submitter wants particular high-end features (like CMYK for professional print output).

In transportation terms, he's looking for a vehicle that can:

- transport several people / several tons of kit
- rapidly (>100mph)
- to / from endpoints without infrastructure (ie. no roads / runways etc.)
- over inhospitable terrain...but is not a helicopter.

Good luck searching. Most people just accept that they need a helicopter to do this job, and therefore you have to pay what a helicopter costs (or a V22 if you're feeling lucky / suicidal - IMO).

In some ways I prefer GIMP. I'm not sure if that's because I'd used it more though. However, some people might say that the "clutter" is having stuff immediately accessible or visible- or simply the manifestation of Photoshop being more powerful.

And I notice that some people say that GIMP is nicer for programmers and people with that mentality. Which is fine, but Photoshop wasn't created with primarily that market in mind.

I took the latest PhotoShop Beta for a spin recently. I couldn't figure out how to do the most basic things like use a line drawing tool.

What were you expecting to get out of it? You do realise that Photoshop isn't- by reputation- a pick-up-and-go package, and isn't meant to be?

Adobe released Photoshop Elements for that market. You may think I'm demeaning you by suggesting the lite "consumer" or "beginner" version- but you were the one you expected it to be easy, and criticised it for failing in that respect. The full Photoshop is designed to be powerful, not easy. Elements is still quite powerful for something easy to use.

Actually, I'd suggest that Photo Deluxe (Elements' predecessor) was even easier to use- but that was very cut down and wizard-based, and has been discontinued.

I'm sure with professional training I'd be doing all kinds of amazing things, but seriously, for the hefty price tag I'd expect a UI that made things easy enough to figure out on my own.

No, the reason Photoshop is expensive is that it's a serious tool with a large number of features, priced for the professional market it's aimed at. You're paying for the power, not the ease of use.

You can only go so far in making something easy to use without losing flexibility.

I don't know Photoshop well enough to claim that everything "hard" in the interface can be explained as an intentional move by its developers to choose power and flexibility over immediate ease-of-use and intuitiveness (as opposed to bad interface design). But I do know that it's generally accepted that Photoshop is *not* aimed at the casual user.

I'm sure there's got to be cheap/free classes/lessons on the internet for this stuff.
If you are teaching this software to the students and they can't afford it, then what's the point as they will never actually be able to use the software?
If they are going to use the skills at work, then why won't your company purchase proper licenses for them?

Every design program worth using should be able to output CYMK TIFFs. And every printing company worth dealing with should be able to use them as a source.Personally, I use Corel's Graphic Suite [corel.com]. Corel DRAW has been an industry standard right along side Illustrator. Their PHOTO-PAINT is a pretty strong competitor to Photoshop.

The other programs included in the Suite I don't find much use. But getting a Photoshop and Illustrator -like programs for $400 is pretty good. Also check their upgrade eligibilit [corel.com]

1) If you are working in sRGB you have constrained yourself to a very small gamut. Yes, it looks better on the screen, but it will look clipped and posterized in print.
2) TIFF is not a good archival format. But if you work in JPEG, you end up getting a degraded image. Every time you close and reopen the image you are recompressing the file. With a TIFF, this is not a problem since the compression is lossless. Since JPEG is lossy, opening and resaving the file degrades the image.
3) You are correct in say

TIFF is a way to waste disk space. It's used by people who think "300 dpi" (used in place of pixel dimensions) is meaningful for a digital image, and by people who think that abusing CMYK makes you a Real Professional.

Yea! Idiots. Everyting today uses RGB! Why use CMYK, when you can use what everyone uses. You have CMYK printer? Get a RGB printer!

Be modern and smart, CMYK was very popular around Januari-Februari 1994, but then peopel realized this is very old, and no longer used it.

Right So the CMYK press should print in what colors? Oh RGB but RGB doesn't fit the same color Gamut as CMYK. SO Uh WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT. but what would I know I just have a masters in Digital pre-press from RIT.

Not sure of a good PDF editor, but it looks like this claims to do the trick (though i'm sure is nowhere near the level of Acrobat Pro): PDFEdit [petricek.net]. Be warned it looks like it's a cygwin port to windows...

I can't guarantee that those will all live up to your expectations, but I am fairly familiar with most of that software, and it certainly gets the job done.

Scribus will probably be hot stuff in three to five years, but for now, it's low-end desktop publishing, only a couple of steps above Word. In particular, Scribus currently offers only rudimentary support for tables, which was a dealbreaker for me.

There's LaTeX, of course, but I'm not yet ready to drink that particular ocean. LaTeX is oriented toward document design, whereas I need page design. I need to move the illo on page 43 two picas to the right, and then I need to look at it and decide to move it back. Dipping in and out of a config file to do that isn't appealing.

For my current DTP project, I had to move from Linux back to WinXP just so I could use InDesign. InDesign is a great program, but even so... groan.

Now, let's be honest: there's no such thing as an alternative to Adobe's creative suite.

There's nothing out there that can compete in ease of use, or power. Someone mentioned superior tools to web design (notepad, for example) and I can agree there. But for the rest of the products mentioned (among them, photoshop, illustrator, indesign etc.) there's nothing else that can hold a candle up to Adobe.

Trying to peer into a professional point of view, it would seem the consensus is that no other suite touches Adobe suite. A mix of apps may work, but they will be non-standardised ui, such as the much vaunted Gimp.

I run 100% on Linux except in this domain. CorelDraw suite is dirt cheap compared to Adobe, has both vector and bitmap (Great CMYK support) and is a solid worker. My graphic artist friends describe it as a production tool instead of a creative tool, but they got work to pay for their copies of CS3. I cannot wait for Xara to finish their Corel import filter - Or for Corel to get back into Linux app market (Yup, I'm a dreamer!). Newer versions with new MS installer isn't working under WINE yet, so I run a c

Suggestions...Web Design:Dump FrontPage, move to SharePoint designer (in Office 2007) or MS Expression Web Designer. (The products are the same, SharePoint version has additional features for SharePoint sites.) Unlike FrontPage, these push CSS and standards harder than any other web product currently in the mainstream, are still easy, but provide some of the best tools to move developers to CSS and understanding concepts beyond the old HTML tags. (Yes I know these are MS products, but honestly are nothing

I've recently written and self-published a book Zero to Superhero, and it's been formatted with Microsoft Word and OpenOffice, so it's interior is rather plain jane (the cover was done with GIMP and I'm very happy with the results). The problem I've found with Adobe Indesign as well as Scribus is the fact these programs don't understand.doc files. I can't simply import the doc files of my book into Indesign or Scribus and work on them directly.I'd expect this type of behavior from proprietary software like

It sounds like you are contemplating buying one copy of the entire premium suite for everyone. Probably overkill. Find out which apps they need and buy only those. If you can get the price down you will quickly cross the "unproductivity and training for poorly-documented apps exceeds the cost of commercial apps that have great resources available at your local book store" threshold.

There are many alternatives, but none of them offer what Adobe's products offer. Some may argue that many applications are closing in on tools like Photoshop, but I firmly believe that the support for these programs is what makes it so dominating.

I am a professional Photoshop user and have become one thanks to the vast amount of tutorials and discussions that relate directly to Photoshop. I know Gimp and I know Paint Shop Pro, but aside from the fact that none of these tools are quite as extensive as Photoshop, you still want that large community to back you up when you need help.

To answer the question of the main article, I would say that the best alternative to Photoshop is yet another Adobe product: Photoshop Elements. It's a capped version of Photoshop at some $100 in retail stores. This is fully comparable to Paint Shop Pro, which is about the same price.

Here it is: Pixel http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12 [kanzelsberger.com]. And it is developed by one person. And it costs 1% of Photoshop price. And it does have a sensible UI, very similiar to Photoshop. Try out the demo. I've bought it and it was worth every cent, even if its still in beta version.

And yes. It does run on Linux. And on BSD. And on Mac. And on BeOS, and dozen other OSes.

At least for mac users, there are quite a few very well designed and maintained products that are shareware and rival Adobe's offerings in both features and pizazz.

RapidWeaver [realmacsoftware.com] is an industrial-strength alternative to Dreamweaver which includes an SDK, full drag-n-drop designing interface, coding panel, Flash integration, and site maintenance. Currently it's $49.

Coda [panic.com] is the newcomer on the block, built by one of the best Mac shareware coding companies. As with the others, it allows for drag-n-drop designing and fully supports XHTML. Panic Software's tagline "shockingly good Mac software" is evident here cause they integrate the features of Transmit (their excellent FTP utility) including site/filepath synchronization, drag-n-drop uploading from the Dock... Coda also includes a console that's integrated into the app window that allows for split terminal shells for SSH and other functions. Coda includes a GUI CSS editor and comprehensive HTML programmer's guide in the application itself. $79.

TextMate [macromates.com] is the Mac's premiere enterprise-level, yet shareware price text editor that does... pretty much anything. It can handle just about as many language bundles as jEdit but is purely Mac. It integrates well with Transmit, the shell, Subversion, and has a fully customizable code snippet library for full programmer control. I can't even begin to summarize all the features that sets this editor apart from the others, but it easily shames Dreamweaver's code window. Just watch the screencasts on the website. It costs 39.

CSSEdit [macrabbit.com] by MacRabbit is a GUI-powered CSS editor which has a snooping mode called X-Ray that can analyze a website's design similar to Firefox's 3rd party Web Developer addon, except with style, polish, and features that you've come to expect from Mac applications. It includes a CSS "builder" workflow that allows you to use some natural language and object-oriented programming (in the most basic sense) to build CSS effects. $29.95

There are many others including Apple's own iWeb [apple.com] (which is included with every new Macintosh, is VERY easy to use, and puts out bloated-yet XHTML compliant code) and BBEdit [barebones.com] by Bare Bones Software which is very comparable to TextMate in many ways.

On the OS X side of things, when OS X was updated with core image a lot of people were talking about how someone would be able to swoop in and offer a front-end to all the built in image filters that were part of core image. (you can see a list of all the filters that are part of it here [apple.com]. You could open up Core Image Fun House (on the OS X install disc) and play around will all the filters, and easily imagine a company making an interface for that power, offering 60% of the power of photoshop for a fraction of the cost.

Cut a long story short, someone seems to be almost ready to finally do this, Pixelmator [pixelmator.com]. Cheap, neat and looks like it's easy to use [tuaw.com]. Not a real photoshop competitor, but then again most people pirate photoshop for light photo retouching and occasional messing around. This looks like it could handle what a lot of casual photoshop users want without the insane price tag.

If you're serious that CMYK printing is one of the goals you want to accomplish, you've really no choice but to pony up for professional applications. Printing is not cheap, you'll spend hundreds of dollars per job at the printer, any money you "save" on software is guaranteed to be paid many times over to the printer for fixing your files and getting them ready for press. Making software that works for prepress requires spending lots of money on paper and ink experiments, money that GIMP and Scribus simply cannot spend unless a sponsor steps up.

If all you're trying to do is educate the users about CMYK, then of course you can use pretty much any software that works nicely with a desktop inkjet printer that can do CMYK proofing (in a pinch Photoshop can be used as a RIP for this purpose assuming you have one copy of it). Of course no proof is ever the same as a real print, so eventually people will hit a wall in their real knowledge until big $$$ is spent on real jobs that you get back from the printer and realize were not quite as good as they thought they'd be.

...while GIMP was quite useful for resizing and retouching photos for the web site, we ran into serious limitations as soon as we tried to produce material for printing (biz cards, trade show banners, etc.).

GIMP does not support Pantone(tm) colors, so we cannot use it for accurate color matching. This means that, even when we get the color exactly the way we want it on our screen and printer, it is likely to come out way different on a professional printer, i.e., the one your printer will likely use to print biz cards, letterhead, trade show banners, etc. For example, some of the professional HP printers are notorious for rendering what you think as blue into a purple-ish color. We end up squandering everyone's time in a guess-the-actual-color game to get even close to the color we intended.

With Pantone support, the problem is solved because we'll select the EXACT colors we want using the standard color swatches from their kit, and our printer will be able to reliably print these EXACT colors.

Since the info I've found indicates that GIMP does not even plan to support Pantone, we must switch, probably to Photoshop, if for no other reason that it is the industry standard, and we'll have a greater level of exchange and collaboration with our printers.

So, I'm sorry to say that my open-source bias has again bitten me in the arse. I knew better than to have skipped past my product research, but I just went for the OS solution. Now, I've squandered valuable time in a startup biz learning the quirks of software that will now be replaced. There, I've said it, so mod me down.

Designers care about getting a tool that allows them to complete their workflow in the highest quality, in the shortest amount of time. If the tool they are given has some fucked up interface where they can't find anything, that prevents them from getting their work done, and they get pissed off. They see no benefit to using GIMP over Photoshop, because they have been using Photoshop for years, and know exactly where everything is.

I managed to ramrod through a transition from QuarkXPress to Adobe InDesign at the company I work for three years ago, and the only way I could make that transition was to set InDesign to use Quark keyboard shortcuts and menus - something Adobe added because they knew it was necessary to match functionality and ease transition, because no one in their target demographic is going to take a couple weeks out of their advertising schedule in order to learn new layout software.

In the real world, billboards and newspaper ads need to be produced, and fucking around with the flavor-of-the-month OSS version of layout or editing software impedes that for most people. Paying Adobe's price usually ends up saving a lot of time and money in the end.

If you are looking for an IDE replacement to Dreamweaver, check out http://www.evrsoft.com/ [evrsoft.com], and pick up 1st page. I have used them off and on for a lot of years. I mainly use Dreamweaver, but I find it very easy to switch between them.

The latest and greatest software is always tempting, but what are you really getting? I must admit, I rushed to buy CS3, but I use the tools professionally and needed the new stuff.

I strongly suggest buying older copies of Adobe products if you can. After years of use, I really haven't found the changes to be that drastic. A beginner would hardly notice any difference, and there are some serious benefits aside from the cost.

Old Adobe products run with excellent performance. Opening up Photoshop 7 side-by-side with CS3 makes me wonder why I'm even using CS3. Each upgrade gets slower. Unless you absolutely need the latest & greatest feature, not likely as a beginner, then prior versions will do just fine.

Education may just be where pirated software is most appropriate. If most corporations are paying full freight for applications, and an employee skilled on an application is the best salesman for that product, software vendors shoot themselves in the foot for NOT providing their products free to students. Maybe a hidden watermark that says "academic" would prevent them from using it once they land that good job.

It's a shame to see people like the parent being so blindly conditioned to the current backward model of intellectual property. How long will we have to use buggywhips to fly jet planes?

It's a shame to see people like the parent being so blindly conditioned to the current backward model of intellectual property. How long will we have to use buggywhips to fly jet planes?

It's an even bigger shame to see people use software from companies that created and perpetuate that "intellectual property" model. Every person trained to use their tools is a vote for their software and model. Scribus, inkscape, GIMP, bluefish and many other tools make good replacements for non free software.

I tried Scribus about a year ago, and it was nowhere near as good as InDesign or QuarkXpress. It included only the most basic features, and even lacked some of those. Also, it was far from a professional-level interface - I had a hard time finding the functions I needed, and the interface was far from intuitive. I would put it maybe on par with MS Publisher, but it was nowhere near being in the same class as InDesign and QuarkXpress.

Uuuuh, can't let you say that. It *is* way more powerful than MS Publisher. The problem is that it has a complex user interface, quite difficult to master, and requires an advanced understanding of color profiles (ICC) to set up the pre-press capabilities properly, and to produce X-PDF files.

But if I were a publisher who did not have $2500 to spare every 4 years for a new QuarkXPress license, I would certainly give Scribus a try.

My company's WinImages [blackbeltsystems.com] offers most of what Photoshop does, plus a considerable number of features that Photoshop does not, particularly in the area of layered image editing. WinImages is about $50, starts and runs faster, has a smaller footprint, and offers UI methods that can save a step for every application of a filter or effect, particularly helpful when you're doing extensive image repairs or editing, for instance. The $50 price is a discount that applies if you have any Adobe, Corel or JASC product,

Parent post modded off-topic, sure, but pirating Adobe software is advice that, given this situation, doesn't necessarily hurt Adobe. Look at it from the perspective of this "business-model". Your co-workers don't know how to use any of Adobe's products, and can't afford to buy them. They can, with limited technical knowledge (or knowing someone with that knowledge), pirate the full versions and pay nothing. They play around with the software and get comfortable with it.Now your company CAN afford to buy th

HTML is not so complex of a language that we shouldn't have a WSYIWYG to make the job less frustrating. I see nothing wrong with users who want to build websites as they would build a document or an image.

I teach Website Development at a TAFE and I have found Notpad++ [sourceforge.net] to be pretty good. It is still a simple text editor, but it's free and it colour-codes your text (useful for finding those unclosed tags or quotation marks).

Dreamweaver does more, but it depends greatly what you are doing. I use Dreamweaver a lot, but I spend nearly all my time in code view anyway. The only major problem I have with Dreamweaver is it's inability to handle frames properly. but frankly, no WYSIWYG editor does. You're better off setting frames and framesets in text editors anyway, if you are using them at all.

Hm, that's slightly ignorant -- in that case, shouldn't they be designing web pages and not coding them?
Don't get me wrong, I agree with you, but seriously--designers will be designers, some will work best in a WYSIWYG environment where design--not code--is the focus. I would say these people should learn as quickly as possible how to code the designs they make that way, but for some, they really are most interested in the design. Good design tools like Dreamweaver that allow you to ignore the code in most cases are fairly good for that purpose.

Agreed, if the 'web designer' doesn't know enough css and html to code everything by hand, he should just create something in Photoshop/The Gimp and let a skilled coder write clean css and xHTML. Using any kind of WYSIWYG editor will resuult in crappy code.

We can't all be web designers. Besides, I thought one of Web's strongest points was freedom of expression. Gotta lower the technical bar if you really want anybody to be able to express themselves on the Web.

"People that don't understand HTML and CSS shouldn't to webdesign in the first place."Why should someone learn to program HTML just to make a webpage? With a WYSIWYG editor, it's unnecessary. Sure, those editors don't make the most beautiful code, but it's HTML for God's sake!

I think that statement's equivalent to saying someone shouldn't make documents unless they learn LaTeX, or should only use a computer if they know the command line - but then there are probably people who believe that too.

They don't.. but if they want to make a dynamic webpage, for a company, for money, they better know HTML. When a page is dynamic, the page needs to be designed with that in mind. You're not designing a flyer, you're designing something that can change drastically depending on what flows into it.

Basically, a web designer who doesn't know html is going to have a hard time finding a job.

The GPs statement statement comes from web programmers who have to then take that design and make it work in a complex web application and it often times involves (1) re-creating images so they work with multiple backgrounds instead of the one background the designer drew it on, (2) re-coding the entire page or even site so that you can actually read the excuse for HTML that has been dumped out by those programs, (3) removing all the redundant tags and replacing the others with proper CSS, (4) renaming style1, style2, style3, etc... to actual proper decent style names so they actually describe what they are representing (top_menu_text, for instance), (5) fixing the pages so that fonts can actually be resized without completely messing up the layout of the page (and breaking image alignment, etc).

Gah, I can go on and on about the crap that frontpage and dreamweaver spit out as an excuse for HTML, and don't even get me started on XHTML. Designers who use those tools can do great creative things with it and it looks great on one or two browsers that are configured they way most browsers are configured. Unfortunately in my line of work I have usually take what the designer has done and completely rewrite it. If designers were actually forced to write in HTML or at least look at the HTML output of the programs they used, then I wouldn't have to do that nearly as much.

Seconded, as strongly as I can...Design and implementation are two different things.

Let a graphic artists/designer/whatever *design* the pages, but get a real web engineer to actually implement them. Do you think the editors of/. use DreamWeaver to dream up new and brilliant layouts? Would Google use FrontPage to make their front page? Does Yahoo even look at GoLive for their new content?

HELL NO

Any company worth its salt and with a web presence that matters to them will have some kind of artistic person

Besides, those fancy editors leave in lots of drag-inducing whitespace and pointless formatting. Not only that, but it's the same whitespace and formatting as most of the other websites out there. Do search engine spiders ignore identical formatting, or does that count against the site's "uniqueness"?

Cinepaint is certainly worth a look if you need something for
simple operations on high bit depth imnages
(e.g. retouching, levels, scaling sharpening etc) It's not photoshop,
but it does work. Although there is a new design in the
works (glasgow), the original gimp forked version is still
under development and has become quite stable. I have
run several hundred raw 16 Megapixel images from my Canon 1Ds
through it without a burp.
What has happened to the gimp is truly a shame. Once one
of the leading L

The BMW drives in style and fast, gets full service for free (4 years of 50,000 miles), has touch-screen interfaces and 8-point surround audio that plays all the formats, and gets you where you need to go quickly and elegantly. Did I mention it's a brand new model, just out this year?

The Model T drives you places, but it takes 3 times longer and sometimes you have to go to the back and crank the handle, or even open the hood to fix that loose sprocket yourself. Plus the stereo is just a boombox and it's pretty hard to control and skips when you run over bumps. But hey, it goes. Practically the same!

Though there is still the question, would you take a free Model T over a BMW at full price?

The color spaces for CMYK and RGB do not quite match, so conversion is not perfect. However, if by CMYK support you really mean you use it because your print shop expects it then the conversion is probably good enough.